NTEN is conducting another in its series of vendor satisfaction surveys. This time they want your input on donor management systems. Their pitch:

Tell us what you love -- and what frustrates, irks, and just generally annoys you -- and we'll compile the results into a handy report, then give it to everybody who fills out the survey, for free

• Read more

While working to increase traffic to your website or better highlight your campaigns, I'm sure many of you have encountered the big 'SEO' issues. Not sure what SEO is? Search Engine Optimization is a term that started with the corporate world—all those companies competing to ensure that their links pop up at the top of the list when you search with a keyword or term related to their products. Well, the same techniques and ideas have been adopted by successful marketers and campaign managers for nonprofit organizations.

Unfortunately though, there are some pretty common mistakes made when trying to optimize how you're found online. Wordtracker's Mark Nunney has listed the twelve most common mistakes made in Search Engine Optimization on his blog.

The Chronicle of Philanthropy recently held an online forum with Beth Kanter of Beth's Blog and Jonathon Colman of The Nature Conservancy. They addressed questions such as:

• What are the best methods for driving traffic to your Web site?
• How should I promote my organization's Facebook page?
• How do we increase visibility for our campaign site without detracting from our main Web site?
• How do Web crawlers, bots, etc., and especially Google rank a site?
• and lots more.
  
  • Read more

NTEN published the results of its Content Management System Satisfaction Survey a couple of weeks back, so if you haven't seen it yet and are considering different CMS types for your organization, it'd be worth taking a look.

More than 1,000 people participated in the survey, providing ratings for more than 27 different systems ranging from proprietary to open-source. The final report provides grades for the 15 systems that received more than 10 responses each. The report provides overall scores for each system, as well as scores by organization size, helping you gauge whether a system needs an on-site support system or not.

A posting on the Information Systems Forum listserve alerted me to TechRepublic's list of 60 Indispensable Microsoft Word tips.  Some are basic, like Undo (I hope everyone already knows that one).  But many were new to me, like how to select multiple, noncontiguous words, clear the contents of a table with one keystroke, create styles on the fly, and toggle field codes on and off with a hotkey. If your time is at a premium like most of my friends and colleagues in the nonprofit world, every shortcut can make a difference.

Citizen Schools and the Public Learning Media Laboratory have launched a survey to gather detail about specific Web 2.0 and social networking technologies that nonprofits are using.

This follows a survey the groups published in March, called Web 2.0 & Social Networking Nonprofit Survey (PDF).  That survey found:

For those of you interested in learning more about greening the technology at your organization, there will be an interesting forum on the topic in San Francisco next Thursday.

What:
The World Affairs Council Presents Green Technology: Global Opportunities and Challenges

When:
Thursday July 17, 2008 6:30 PM - 8:00 PM

Where:
World Affairs Council Auditorium
312 Sutter Street, Second Floor
San Francisco, California 94108

Cost:
Member: Free
Non-member: $15.00

• Read more

If you are in the Bay Area and want to learn more about Web analytics (measuring and reporting site traffic and techniques for building an audience), this event is probably for you. Check out the details below and then head to Mountain View for a session full of information on how to harness Web data to better reach your audience and constituents. Here's more about the event:

What: The Silicon Valley American Marketing Association (SVAMA) presents: Actionable Web Analytics
When: July 3rd, 7:45 — 9:00 AM (breakfast provided)
Where: Google — Building B43, 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway, Mountain View, CA

• Read more

If you're in the market for new grants management software, or want to see how your current package stacks up to others out there, check out two reports recently released by Idealware.org. According to the description on their site:

The Consumers Guide to Grants Management Software

• Read more

Convio, a popular online advocacy toolset used by many nonprofit advocacy groups, recently announced that they will be releasing a donor database code-named Akido, on the SalesForce.com platform. This will be a separate product from their online Constituent Relationship Management suite — you don't have to be a Convio CRM client to use the database. They also say it's not simply a new template for SalesForce, but a product built from the ground up.